Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 : Mailbox management - Managing Recipients - Exporting EAC information to CSV files

An email server such as Exchange deals with huge differences in terms of object numbers. The largest Exchange organizations running outside Office 365 have over half a million mail-enabled objects. However, the smallest organizations might deal with just a few dozen mailboxes. EAC is designed to handle anything from the smallest demonstration environment to the largest production deployment.

Clearly, only a limited amount of information can be presented on any computer screen. As it moves to the different types of recipients, EAC displays the initial set of objects in alphabetical order. To see different sets of objects, you must either scroll down through pages of data (tiresome if the object you want is a number of pages down) or use the EAC search capabilities.

EAC does not support the same kind of recipient-filtering capabilities as does EMC, which allows the console to focus on specific sets of objects such as all the mailboxes in a specific database. Instead, all the sections of EAC that might deal with large numbers of objects, including recipients, have a search box in which you can type some characters to request EAC to display matching objects. Figure 1 shows how the search box works when dealing with mailboxes. In this instance, EAC has detected that you might be searching against the various name attributes stored for mailboxes. Not all mailbox properties can be used for searching. For example, you cannot search against the company attribute, but you can against the department.

Figure 1. Searching for specific mailboxes in EAC

EAC also includes an Advanced Search option available by clicking the ellipsis. This option is available for all recipient types and can be used to look for any recipient of the selected type (mailboxes, groups, contacts, public folders), using values such as those stored in the 15 custom attributes available for Exchange mail-enabled recipients. Advanced Search is the closest to the kind of filtering that EMC offers and is just as powerful.

EAC includes an option to export the current list view to a comma-separated values (CSV) file. CSV files are often used to work with Exchange data because they can be loaded into applications such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and then manipulated before being reused for some purpose. For instance, the standard method used by Exchange 2013 to move mailboxes is to create and process migration batches . You can input a set of mailbox names to be moved, or you can provide EAC with a CSV file containing the set. Say you wanted to move all the mailboxes that are currently in database DB2 to a new database. To do this, you’d specify database = DB2 in an advanced search. After you execute the search, EAC displays all the mailboxes in the database. You can then click the ellipsis and choose to export the current view to a CSV file. You then select the fields to be exported (only the email address field is necessary for a migration batch) and click Export. EAC generates a CSV file you can open with Notepad (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Building a CSV file from mailbox information

This is a very simple example of how mailbox information can be exported and reused within Exchange 2013. You can export information to a CSV file by using similar steps for any of the object types that are managed through the recipients section.

Although they exist, EAC does not reveal the existence of system mailboxes. In this respect, you have:

These mailboxes have a clearly intended purpose; otherwise, Exchange would not create them. For this reason, you should not delete or otherwise change their Active Directory accounts or mailbox details. The exception to this rule is when you want to remove a mailbox database that contains some arbitration or discovery mailboxes. In this case, you always need to move these mailboxes out of the database before you can remove it.